We report the first lattice QCD calculation of the glue spin in the nucleon. The lattice calculation is carried out with valence overlap fermions on 2+1 flavor DWF gauge configurations on four lattice spacings and four volumes including an ensemble with physical values for the quark masses. The glue spin SG in the Coulomb gauge in the MS scheme is obtained with the 1-loop perturbative matching. We find the results fairly insensitive to lattice spacing and quark masses. We also find that the proton momentum dependence of SG in the range 0 ≤ | p| < 1.5 GeV is very mild, and we determine it in the large momentum limit to be SG = 0.251(47)(16) at the physical pion mass in the MS scheme at µ 2 = 10 GeV 2 . If the matching procedure in large momentum effective theory is neglected, SG is equal to the glue helicity measured in high-energy scattering experiments.Introduction: Deep-inelastic scattering experiments reveal that contrary to the naive quark model, the quark spin contribution to the proton spin is quite small, about 30% [1][2][3]. In an effort to search for the missing proton spin, recent analyses [4,5] of the high-statistics 2009 STAR [6] and PHENIX [7] experiments at RHIC showed evidence of non-zero glue helicity ∆G in the proton. For Q 2 = 10 GeV 2 , the glue helicity distribution ∆g(x, Q 2 ) is found to be positive and away from zero in the momentum fraction region x < 0.05. However, the results are limited by very large uncertainty in this region.The recent COMPASS analysis explored ∆g(x) from the scaling violation of ∆q(x), and the highly distinct solutions of ∆g(x) can be obtained with different parameterizations of ∆q(x) [8]. Therefore, it hints that if a high precision ∆g(x) can be obtained directly, it will benefit our understanding of the parameterizations of ∆q(x) and provide more information about the role of quark spin in the proton.Given the importance of ∆g(x) to explain the origin of the proton spin, and the fact that significant efforts are devoted to its precise experimental determination, a theoretical understanding and calculation of ∆G is highly desired. ∆G is defined as the first moment of the glue helicity distribution ∆g(x) [9],where the light front coordinates areThe proton plane wave state is written as |P S , with momentum P µ = (P, 0, 0, P ) and polarization S. The light-cone gauge-link L(ξ − , 0) =is defined in the adjoint representation. It connects the gauge field tensor and its dual,F αβ = 1 2 αβµν F µν , to construct a gauge invariant operator. After integrating over x, one can define the gauge-invariant gluon helicity operator in a non-local form [10,11],where ∇ + = ∂/∂ξ − . It is the gauge-invariant extension (GIE) of the operator E × A in the light-cone gauge A + = 0, but one cannot evaluate this expression on the lattice directly due to its real-time dependence.On the other hand,S g is equal to the infinite momentum frame (IMF) limit of a universality class of operators [12] whose matrix elements can be matched to ∆G through a factorization formula in large momentum effect...